Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1029003What is balance?

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1029003Well that's not it for sure. It's no one's job to make a tabletop RPG balanced. If players would just role-play, feeling useful or not wouldn't be an issue during a session.

Quote from: Psikerlord;1029009Balanced encounters to me means fights within a certain power band, not too heavy, not too lite. Just right.

Quote from: Psikerlord;1029009It appeared most starkly for me in 4e, when fights took so long you couldnt "waste time" with random encounters or side treks (which in hindishgt is a sure sign the system is broken). We enjoyed 4e for 3 years, on and off...  but ultimately that system made it clear to me that fast combat, random encounters, adn ease of adlibing side treks are essential to a great game. I will not play a tabletop RPG with such long combats again; it might be a fun enough game in itself, but from a broader perspective you lose too much.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1029012No, it doesn't.  I means making sure that the table has fun.  If throwing a higher level threat (and by that I mean something that the players can't handle) that forces the players to plan around and/or avoid, but they enjoy themselves?  Than you've found the right balance.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1029012No, it doesn't.  I means making sure that the table has fun.  If throwing a higher level threat (and by that I mean something that the players can't handle) that forces the players to plan around and/or avoid, but they enjoy themselves?  Than you've found the right balance.



That's because 4e was trying refine something and it didn't succeed at it.  The issue was that like it's predecessors, it was built around resource management, ammunition, spells, hit points, all resources that deplete.  In 3.x that got heavily codified and hammered out, as it introduced the relatively clunky Challenge Rating system.  They also played other editions to see what the average game had in terms of encounters per session, and it worked out a number I forget.  Also, they found out that if an encounter lasted more than four combat rounds (assuming the players stayed and fought) they got bored.  And this is something they found out over decades of playing D&D themselves as well.

4e tried to codify it further, but sadly no one wanted that.  Despite claiming that's what they did.  A lot of 4e's failures as a system was because they wanted to listen to a fanbase who claimed one thing, but played another.

Quote from: RebirthTeam;1028985Having unbalanced encountered is an invaluable tool in a story tellers pocket. Not only is it great for story telling and creating that tension in the players, but it always seems to work as the perfect team cohesiveness building situation.

When the exchanges tend to be too easy, players can just breeze through it, do a few dice rolls, and never really get into character. That is a huge problem, especially when the GM refuses to let players die, but that is another post altogether. Once this no longer works (usually they realize this once the character dies), the players have to actually engage the game fully, consider every option, and work through it as a team. The difficulty and calculations pull so much of the players attention, next thing they know, they are completely immersed in the game.

This also refers to difficult puzzles and role playing situations.

Quote from: joewolz;1028977This idea fascinates me. Do you (or anyone else) have any examples of this kind of mechanic?

Dungeon- Monsters will automatically attack and/or pursue any characters they 'see,' with the exception of those monsters which are intelligent enough to avoid an obviously superior force. There is no chance for avoiding if the monster has surprised the adventurers and is within 20 feet, unless the monster itself has been surprised.
Pursuit: If the adventurers choose to flee, the monster will continue to pursue in a straight line as long as there is not more than 90 feet between the two. When a corner is turned or a door passed through or stairs up or down taken the monster will only continue to follow if a 1 or a 2 is rolled on a 6-sided die. If a secret door is passed through the monster will follow only on a roll of 1. Distance will open or close dependent upon the relative speeds of the two parties, men according to their encumbrance and monsters according to the speed given on the Monster Table in Vol. II. In order to move faster characters may elect to discard items such as treasure, weapons, shields, etc. in order to lighten encumbrance. There is a 25% chance that any character surprised by a monster will drop some item. If he does, roll for the possibilities remembering that only these items held could be so dropped. Burning oil will deter many monsters from continuing pursuit. Edible items will have a small likelihood (10%) of distracting intelligent monsters from pursuit. Semi-intelligent monsters will be distracted 50% of the time. Non-intelligent monsters will be distracted 90% of the time by food. Treasure will have the opposite reaction as food, being more likely to stop intelligent monsters.

Wilderness-Castle Inhabitants will pursue on a roll of a 1-3 if they are hostile to the party, and only on a 1 if they are basically neutral. Evasion is the same as described below for monsters.
Evading: This action is a function of the size of the party of adventurers and the number of monsters, modified by surprise, terrain and comparative speed. Use the following table as a guideline.

Surprise by party means that evasion chances are doubled.
Surprise by monsters negates all chance of evasion unless party is able to use some form of magic, or terrain is woods.
Woods add 25% to evasion chances and give a 10% chance of evasion even if surprised.
If the comparative speed of the two parties is such that one is at least twice as fast as the other, the faster will have the effect of increasing/decreasing evasion chances by 25%. This includes surprise situations.

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Willie the Duck

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Unbalance

#28

March 13, 2018, 08:21:09 AM Last Edit: March 13, 2018, 11:44:43 AM by Willie the Duck

Well I expect this to quickly become a battle-royale over everything except the actual topic of balanced encounters. Hopefully not, but we'll see.

Quote from: Skarg;1029022"Balancing encounters" is to me a sign of a GM or designer not thinking of the game world as an actual dynamic situation. It seems pathological to me when the only things PCs meet are things they can defeat in combat, or things the GM lets them know they're not intended to fight.

I would say that's a step too far. I would call it "practical." Perhaps hewing far too far to the side of practical, but not "pathological." Weekly televised action adventure series like Dr. Who or Hercules: the Legendary Adventures do the exact same thing. The opposition that shows up to battle the heroes are neither unbeatable (unless the plot centers around the protagonists figuring out how to beat them at the 40 minute mark), nor trivial. It's done because it is remarkably convenient. Same with gaming-most of the DM's time can be spent on designing those parts the PCs are going to spend much of their time interacting with. Also convenient in terms of game-time. The PCs do not have to trial-and-error their way to areas of their difficulty level. All of these game design tendencies* came about for reasons. And most of them, I am convinced, revolve around limited gaming-time and prep-time more than most other concerns.
*And let's remember that these are tendencies. You can absolutely play sandbox games in most versions of most games. And lots of people do.

As to the GM or designer not thinking of the game world as an actual dynamic situation. Sure s/he does. It's over there. Behind implied ("That Valley of Dungeon has 12 dragons circling overhead. You don't like your odds"), or stated ("I don't have the Giant Lord's keep planned out yet because that's way above your level") gates.

Quote from: S'mon;10290373e/4e/5e Balanced Encounters are designed so "the players have to actually engage the game fully, consider every option, and work through it as a team" in order to win. The whole point is that every fight should feel like a challenge where they could lose, but if they pull together they should win. The practical result is that games often feel grindy - "not ANOTHER desperate battle..."
I find the opposite of your post - it's the easy/trivial fights and the unwinnable fights that create the feel of a living world, that encourage immersion, and that give rise to the most interesting roleplaying.

A ruleset that encourages the DM to flesh out the areas where the PCs aren't going to end up spending most of their time (either because it is trivial to them or to deadly) is both more immersive, and more work. So there are trade-offs, but in general I find it a positive.

Quote from: Omega;1029062As for more regular balance in RPGs. What I've found is that in actual use it rarely happens. Even a glance at 5e D&Ds CR system shows you that balance can go instantly out the window since the DM can assemble encounters that are easy, or are brutally hard. Or even impossible or unlosable encounters with the right loadout. And to add confusion to the matter there are many who consider that to be balance.

Well of course. Rumors that entire generations of gamers (or just 'modern gamers') want their food cut up into bite sized portions or whatever are greatly exaggerated. 5e really has been, IMO, an honest attempt to make a system that works for as many playstyles as possible. I'd like to have seen a few more things in-the-books (optional gp=xp rules and a pursuit system, for instance). But the CR system absolutely works in this regard.

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Omega

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Unbalance

#29

March 13, 2018, 09:26:25 AM

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1029012No, it doesn't.  I means making sure that the table has fun.  If throwing a higher level threat (and by that I mean something that the players can't handle) that forces the players to plan around and/or avoid, but they enjoy themselves?  Than you've found the right balance.

Thats not how most everyone I've seen use it. Balance for them means that every class has the exact same DPS at X level and every monster has the exact same DPS at X level or in X numbers. For others it meant "No chance of losing".

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